Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Allan gazed out the window. Far below, the New York traffic sounds hummed dimly, reassuringly. Allan said slowly, “I got the names of two good child psychologists, one in Denver and one in San Francisco.”

  “Well, that won’t do a lot of good, since we’re not going to be in Oakland after a few more weeks. We’re all leasing in Kansas City for the Shephard trial. Can’t you take the trouble to memorize our schedule?”

  After a minute she added, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Allan said. “I know you’re worried about Charlie, too. Listen, I’ll find a psychologist in . . .” he blanked for a moment-“Kansas City.”

  “Okay.” Cathy smiled wanly, then clung to him. He could feel the tension in her bare back.

  Charlie had always been such an easy kid. Suzette had been the temperamental one. That’s why they were concerned, Allan told himself; it was all relative. Still, for Charlie to just sit and go into a trance where he didn’t even answer people . . . that couldn’t be normal, could it? To be so cut off?

  Why, he wouldn’t even be tuned into the Net. Anything could develop, and Charlie wouldn’t even know it!

  Allan held his wife tighter. “I’ll re-route to see him tomorrow.”

  Re-routing wasn’t easy. Neither Jon nor Patti were pleased. Jon had to go himself to check out bone-marrow scanning in Raleigh. The director of a firm making low-cost orbiting solar panels in Dallas wouldn’t be available for another two weeks if Allan missed that appointment, because the director would be in Tokyo. Videoconferencing, the director said sniffily, was not an acceptable substitute. Allan told Patti to tell the director to go to hell. He got a flight to the new apartment in Kansas City.

  But then Paul Sanderson called from Novation. Skaka Gupta must again be somewhere else. “You said . . . I mean, you seced to indicate last time you were here, Allan . . . uh, Mr. Haller . . . that if something noteworthy happened with the bots you wanted to see it right away, so—”

  “And something has? Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t be worse. Can you describe the development to me?”

  “Oh, sure,” Sanderson said, with such relief in his voice that Allan decided he better go to Novation himself after all. The data smelled important. If he took a flight almost immediately to Boston, even flying standby if he had to . . . shit, he hated flying standby, if only developments in transferring people could keep up with innovations in transferring data-if he flew standby, and then could book a flight getting him to the Kansas City lease by at least midnight . . . “Never mind explaining. I’ll be there this afternoon.”

  “Okay,” Sanderson said unhappily. “We’ll be expecting you.”

  We. Him and the robots? Did Sanderson identify with them that much?

  Maybe; engineer types never seemed to have any real life. Just endless tinkering with software, in the same subroutines, same location, same days.

  Suddenly Allan was hit with a memory. So vivid, so visceral, it almost seemed as if he no longer stood in the middle of a frantic metropolitan airport but instead was in the cool woods behind the house where he’d grown up, lying on his back on a carpet of pine needles. Billy Goldman, his best friend, lay beside him, both of them gazing upward at the sun-dabbled branches lacing the sky, smelling the sweet tangy pines, and Billy saying, “Why would anyone want to kiss a girl? Yuuccckkk!”

  Now, where had that come from? Astonished, Allan shook his head to clear it. The mind was a strange thing. Tossing in the unrelated, the pointless, the unprofitable, the irrelevant. The distracting.

  By the time he reached Boston, he had a headache no pills could touch.

  He arrived at Novation in a foul mood. Sanderson met him nervously. “This way, Mr. Haller, we’ll go right to Prime-Eight Two, unless you want some, urn, coffee, or maybe—”

  “No. Let’s go.”

  Sanderson walked past Prime-Eight One without turning his head, but Allan stopped to study the robots. It seemed to him that they gathered their chips a little more smoothly, with less fumbling. He thought he even saw Processed Corn start forward, then swerve abruptly to miss crashing into Ocean Spray Cacheberries. They were starting to cooperate.

  Prime-Eight Two, on the other hand, looked no different. The bots stood motionless on the complex terrain. Allan and Sanderson stood outside the enclosure, Sanderson fidgeting. “Chip fall in seven minutes. We don’t want to alter the schedule, you know, because even though then you wouldn’t have to wait, you wouldn’t really be seeing the exact same phenomenon we’ve been observing, so it isn’t—”

  “I understand,” Allan said. “I can wait.”

  But he bad to do something to fill in seven minutes, besides intimidating Sanderson. The heavy data fire meant he couldn’t access his mesh-Net. Instead, Allan repeated to himself the personal-notes tablet on his son’s Twenty-Two. He had accessed the tablet from the plane, telling himself that parental duty outweighed teenage privacy.

  Age of Reason . . . Age of Reason . . . Information Age . . . Age of Reasoning . . . Enlightenment? No no no . . . Start again Stone Age Iron Age Bronze Age . . . no no NO NO it’s here someplace-TO DO: do sections 84-86 homework for Tuesday find three examples of igneous rock buy mom a birthday present . . . AGE OF REASON . . . The girl I saw in the park was not wearing underwear!!!!! . . . Age of Reason . . .

  The robots behind the plastic wall lumbered into position, a moment before chips scattered from the ceiling. “They’ve learned to cut the anticipation pretty fine,” Sanderson said. Allan didn’t reply. He watched as the bots efficiently gathered all the chips. They seemed no faster than before, but no slower either. His meshnet had gone dead, presumably from the bots’ intense occupation of all available bandwidths to the Net. what exactly were they downloading? And what use were their biochip brains making of it? They didn’t need the Net’s vast libraries of information to gather chips efficiently. “Have you traced their download sources yet?”

  “Some of them,” Sanderson said. He didn’t look at Allan, and his tone was evasive. “Watch-here it comes.”

  But what “came” was . . . nothing. Literally. The robots dumped all the chips into their bucket, held in the graspers of Techs/Mex Chili, and then went motionless.

  Sanderson began to talk very fast. “They’ve been doing that for twenty-four hours now. Gathering the chips the way they’re programmed to, but then just not depositing them through the wall. Nobody’s tinkered with their programming. They just . . . don’t do it.”

  Allan studied Techs/Mex Chili. “What do your download-source traces show?”

  “Not much,” Sanderson said, and Allan saw that his previous evasiveness had been embarrassment. Programmers hated not knowing what was going on in their programs. “Or, rather, too much. They’re apparently accessing all sorts of stuff, bits of everything on the Net, maybe even at random. At least, we haven’t found any patterns yet.”

  “Umm,” Allan said noncommittally. “Squirt the full trace files to my office. Our people will look at it as well.”

  “I don’t really have the authori—”

  “Just do it,” Allan said, but for once the tone of command didn’t work. Sanderson looked scared but determined. “No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. Not without Skaka’s say-so.”

  Allan capitulated. “All right. I’ll call her myself.”

  The young programmer looked relieved. Allan went on studying the quiet robots in their gaudy, silly paint, guarding their bucket of totally useless chips.

  He couldn’t reach Skaka Gupta, so he left her a message to call him. His flight was delayed, and it was well past midnight before the car left him in front of the unfamiliar apartment building in Kansas City. No, not unfamiliar . . . it looked comfortingly like the one in Oakland, the one in Denver, the one in Aspen, the one in New Orleans, the one in Atlanta, the one in Raleigh . . . Mrs. Canning, alerted by the security system, let him in, then stumbled sleepily back to bed. He checked on Suzette, lying with both arms flung out at her sides and one knee bent, looki
ng energetic even in sleep. Her hair had grown. Allan went next to the room Charlie always had. The boy stirred and mumbled as Allan entered. “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hey, son.”

  “What . . . what the reason?”

  “The reason for what, Charlie?” Allan said gently, but Charlie was already back to sleep.

  For several minutes, Allan watched him. Cathy’s light fine hair, Allan’s beaky nose, Charlie’s own individual chin. His son. On his tablet Allan had the name of a good child psychologist in Kansas City. Just don’t let it be neurological, he prayed formlessly. Not a neurological degeneration, not a brain tumor, not any problem they could do nothing about. Not my Charlie.

  In his own bedroom, which he found located where his bedrooms always were, Allan couldn’t sleep. He reviewed the data for the next day’s meetings, both local so he could spend more time with Charlie. He did some sit-ups and stretches, and then he tossed in the new, familiar bed.

  His son sitting and staring into space, unreachable by ordinary communication . . . The robots, refusing to turn in their chips . . . Tomorrow’s meetings, half the data for which he’d already forgotten . . . He didn’t really want to attend any of them anyway. Same old, same old . . . No, what was be thinking? None of it was the same old. It was all interesting new breakthroughs, beachheads on the newest fronts, and he was privileged to have a part in scouting them out . . . So why did he just want to stay huddled forever in this familiar apartment he’d never seen before? Damn, he hated it when he couldn’t sleep!

  Groping beside his bed, Allan picked up his meshnet. Just holding it, unwrapping it, knowing all the information it put at his command, made him feel better instantly. At night the system didn’t signal his messages, merely stored them until he was done sleeping. Maybe there was something from Cathy.

  But the only new message was from Skaka Gupta: Please call me at the lab. Important. The transmission time was only ten minutes ago. She had returned early to Boston, and was working very late.

  “Skaka? Allan Haller. What’s going on?”

  “Hello, Allan.” She sounded tired, as well she might. It was half past one. “I didn’t expect to hear from you till morning. But you might as well know now. We’ve had a temporary setback.”

  “What kind of setback?”

  “The robots have stopped functioning. No, that’s not true-they only look like they’re not functioning because they’re not gathering chips any more, as they were programmed to do. Instead, they’ve speeded up massively the amounts of data they’re pulling off the Net, and processing it in parallel non-stop. And they’re. . .” Her voice stumbled.

  “They’re what?”

  “They’re just huddled together in a ring, touching sides, their visual and auditory and infrared sensors shut down. Just huddled there, blind to their environment.”

  He didn’t answer. After a minute, Skaka’s tone changed, and Allan realized for the first time that, despite her glossy competence, she really was a scientist and not an information-front soldier. No entrepreneur would have said, as she did next, “Allan-I know your firm is small, and that you’ve invested a lot of money in Novation. We can get another grant, but if this project flops, are we going to bring you down?”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll be all right,” Allan said, which was true. He wasn’t ever insane enough to commit all of his resources to the same battle.

  Commit all of his resources to the same battle . . . “That’s good,” Skaka said. “But it doesn’t touch the real issue. Allan, I don’t know what the bots are doing.”

  “I do,” he said, but so softly she couldn’t hear him. Dazed, he managed to get out, “It’s late. Talk in the morning.” He cut the connection.

  And sat on the edge of the bed, naked legs dangling over the side, staring at nothing.

  Commit all of his resources to the same battle . . . That’s what they all had been doing. Many different skirmishes-solar panels, robots, high-resolution imaging, nanotech, smart autos-but all part of the same war. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Age of Chivalry, Space Age . . . Information Age. The only game in town, the scene of all the action, the all-embracing war. Uncle Sam Wants You!

  But no age lasted forever. Eventually the struggle for bronze or gold or green chips-or for physical or digital terrain-would come to an end, just as all the other Ages eventually had. One succeeding the other, inexorable and unstoppable . . . When it’s steamship time, went the old saw, then nothing can stop the steamship from coming. And when the Age of Steam was over, it was over. Civilization was no longer driven by steam. Now it was driven by information. Gather it in, willy-nilly, put it in electronic buckets, give it to the owners. Or the generals.

  Why?

  What if they gave a war and nobody came?

  That’s why the robots had stopped. That’s why they stood staring into space, only their brains active. They had at their command all the data on the Net, plus the complex-and-growing human neural circuits of their biochips. They were on top of it all, wired in, fully cued for the next stage. Not “how can we gather those chips with max-effish” but “rather why should we gather chips at all?”

  Not the Age of Reason. The Reasons Age.

  Things changed. One day steam, then steam is over. One day you can’t imagine wanting to kiss a girl, the next day you pant after it. One day you rely on your frontier neighbors for survival of your very home, the next day you don’t know your neighbors’ names and don’t have a settled home.

  One day the mad rush after information and chips, the next day you sit and stare trance-like, far more interested in why you were interested in chips and information than in the commodities themselves. Not that the information itself wouldn’t continue to accumulate. It would. But the center was shifting, the mysterious heart of each Age where the real emphasis and excitement were. The front.

  Charlie must sense it only dimly. Of course-he was a child, and he didn’t have Allan’s honed instincts. But that Charlie sensed it at all, the coming change, was probably because be was a child-this was the world he would inherit. Charlie would be an integral part of it. But integrated more slowly than the bots, which were riding the advance wave of the human Net, shock troops racing toward where the info-wars gave way to the next step in the long, long march of humanity’s development.

  Which would be . . . what? What would the Reasons Age actually be like?

  Allan shivered. Suddenly he felt old. He had evolved in the Information Age, had flourished in it . . . He was a natural as a scout on the high-tech front. Would there be a place for him when the guns grew more muffled, the pace slowed, and the blaze of battle gave way to the domestic concerns of the occupation? Could he adapt to whatever came next?

  Then his confidence returned. Of course he could! He always had. The Information Age might end, the Reasons Age arise, but he could make it. In fact, there was probably a way to turn the whole thing to his own profit. All he needed was the right approach, the right allies, the right strategy. The right data. Tomorrow, he’d start to gather it.

  Smiling, Allan slept.

  STEADFAST

  Nancy Kress lives in Brockport, New York. She is the author of twelve books: three fantasy novels, six sci-ence-fiction novels, two collections of short stories, and two books on writing fiction. Her most recent novel is Beggars Ride, the third in the trilogy including Beggars in Spain and Beggars and Choosers. Kress’s short fiction appears regularly in Omni, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and other major science-fiction publications.

  How does it feel, Mademoiselle, to be called out of retirement in order to dance at the Opera gala for the coronation of Louis Napoleon?

  That is a silly question, young man. How do you imagine it feels? Are you not in the business of imagining, for your ridiculous newspaper?

  But, Mademoiselle, if you will forgive me, at your age it is unusual for even such a great ballerina to be—

  You know nothing of great ballerinas. Do not believe that you do.

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sp; The first thing he noticed was the blood.

  Dried rust-colored stains on the wide stone step: scattered stains, faint in the lantern light. Yet the soldier saw them immediately. He stopped and stared at the step, at the heavy oak door above. The yellow light shone on his uncreased uniform.

  “Allons, Lefort,” his friends called. “The ladies await!”

  “He is more fascinated by light-footed charmers.”

  “Light-skirted, you mean.”

  “Come along, Lefort, you don’t wish to linger here. The dancers have all departed!”

  “He likes them limber in the sheets . . . Gaspard? Dis donc, we will see you later, at Madame Nathalie’s.”

  “The last of our nights, and he studies a doorway . . . au revoir, mon ami!”

  The soldiers moved off, laughing. The lantern, carried by a servant, moved with them. Gaspard Lefort stared at the blood until he could no longer see it in the darkness. Tomorrow he would march to the war in Austria. He was eighteen years old, privately educated, and this was the first time he had ever left his village near the Pyrenees.

  The heavy door opened and a woman, backlit from within, stepped onto the wide step. She wore a long dark cape with the hood pulled over her head. “You, there! Tell your master to bring the carriage—I am ready!”

  “I am not . . . I have not the honor to be . . . I mean, I don’t know where your carriage is.”

  She peered at him. “You are not M’sieu Carlaine’s man?”

  He moved into the light. “I am only a soldier, Madame.” He remembered to say, “And General Napoleon’s man.”

  She laughed and threw open her cape, and Gaspard saw his mistake. She was not a Madame. No more than fifteen, dressed in a skirt of filmy white layers that ended startlingly short of her ankles. On the low satin bodice rode a brooch, a silver rose flattened to show tiny scattered pearls like tears. Glossy black hair pulled back and ringed with flowers, mouth painted red, she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. The toes of her white slippers were streaked with blood.